A YEAR WITH THE SEALS

For readers of Jenn Ackerman and with a foreword by Sy Montgomery, award-winning environmental journalist Alix Morris spends a year with seals, one of the ocean's most charismatic creatures. She gets to know the creatures themselves, as well as the many human communities affected by their unprecedented return from the brink of extinction, and explores how we can try to bring nature back into balance.

It might be their large, strangely human eyes, their dog-like bark, or their infectious playfulness, but seals have long captured people's interest and affection, making them the perfect candidate for an environmental cause, as well as the subject of decades of study. An award-winning environmental journalist and gripping storyteller, Alix Morris spends a year with these magnetic creatures and brings them to life on the page, season by season, as she learns about their intelligence, inter-species relationships, changing habitats, and complex interactions with humans. Despite humans' longstanding attraction to seals, however, after a shark attack off the coast of Cape Cod, hundreds of residents crowd into a school gymnasium for a town meeting to demand action from government officials. It's a scene right out of Jaws, with one notable difference: the biggest source of contention was not sharks, it was seals. After being hunted to near extinction, the recovery of seals has ignited fury and frustration within coastal communities around the world. Along with the seals themselves, Morris gets to know all of the competing interests in the discussion, from local fisherman whose catch is often diminished by savvy seals, to tribes who once relied seal-hunting for their livelihood, to the seal rescue workers and biologists, to surfers now encountering sharks in coastal waters. In a world where wildlife populations are disappearing at an alarming rate, A Year with the Seals is a rare look at what happens when conservation efforts actually work, and how human tampering with ecosystems continues to have unexpected consequences for a wide variety of species, humans included. Alix Morris has graduate degrees in science writing from MIT and global health from Johns Hopkins, and has published in the Boston Globe Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Magazine, National Geographic, MIT Technology Review, and others. Her first book, A Year with the Seals, is supported by a grant from the Sloan Foundation.